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(1907–77).

Photographer. Following an early involvement with surrealism, she turned to fashion photography and photojournalism. As a leading World War II correspondent, she numbered among the first to photograph German concentration camps when they were liberated in 1945. A native of Poughkeepsie, New York, Elizabeth Miller initially desired a career in theatrical design and lighting. In pursuit of training, at eighteen she went to Paris for a year. Subsequently she studied at the Art Students League for three years, while also modeling for top photographers of the day, including Edward Steichen, who taught her the rudiments of his craft. In 1929 she traveled in Italy before returning to Paris. There she began her serious work in photography, played a leading role in Jean Cocteau's surrealist film Blood of a Poet, and became Man Ray's assistant, model, and lover. Back in New York in 1932, she continued the success she had achieved in the Paris fashion industry with elegantly striking images. After marrying an Egyptian businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, in 1934, she lived mostly in Cairo but did not abandon her madcap ways. Her photographs of Egyptian landscapes and ancient monuments demonstrate more interest in surrealist poetics than factual documentation. In 1939 she left her husband and moved to England to live with surrealist artist, Picasso biographer, and art collector Roland Penrose, later a central figure in the founding and promotion of London's Institute of Contemporary Art. She again worked as a fashion photographer, but with the onset of German bombing in 1940 began to document the war's effects in England. As an accredited correspondent accompanying Allied troops, she departed for the Continent early in 1944 and remained through 1945 to photograph and write about some of World War II's major events. Present for the liberation of Paris, she then witnessed the fall of Germany and the war's turbulent aftermath in eastern Europe. Somewhat unhinged by the brutalities she witnessed, she subsequently photographed relatively little. After marriage to Penrose in 1947, she participated with her husband in advancing the cause of modern art in England while turning her imaginative spirit to cooking and entertaining at their artistically decorated home, Farley Farm. She died there, in the hamlet of Muddles Green, Chiddingly, East Sussex, near Lewes in southern England.